Friday, June 16, 2006

Ended up waking up a bit later than normal today. It was already 8:00 by the time I pulled myself out of bed.

As usual, breakfast wasn't very good. I grabbed french toast thinking that it couldn't be too bad. But when I sat down at the table Tiara warned me that it was supposedly stale. Poking it confirmed it. The sausage would have been good had it been warm still. So my breakfast consisted primarily of grapes.

In our morning session today, we discussed the brignesses of stars and how they're measured. The professor giving the lecture today was unusually boring. At one point, he took nearly 30 minutes to repeat a single point in several slightly different ways.

I used my lunch today at a place called Steak Escape which has Philly cheese steaks. They were quite good but could have been a bit more flavorful. I'm not sure how. Perhaps some pepper jack instead of provelone for cheese.

Then it was back to work. The afternoon session consisted of learning to use IRAF to determine a stars magnitude after correction for atmosphere. This was a simplified version of what I'll be doing for the first of my two projects. However, the project will be much more complicated. For the exercise today, the field of stars was relatively sparse, so it was easy to find a patch of sky right next to the star to determine sky brightness (I'll discuss this in more detail in one of my upcoming astronomical data posts). For my project, I'll be looking at a much denser of stars which requires more advanced methods.

Once we finished this, the group headed to the beach. On the boardwalk there were some cute cartoons in the sand:

As I walked down a bit more I found it was done by a nice old man with a broom

Eventually the sun went down and we headed back to the dorm.

To get the salt out of our hair, we all jumped in the dorm's pool with was wonderfully warm.

Tomorrow we're supposed to finish the task I think everyone finished today, so it should be pretty laid back.